New year's Morning

I called up my dad on New Year's Day morning to wish him a happy new year and, as usual, to make sure he and mom are in good health and good spirits. I dread the day I get the call from one or the other telling me that one or the other is in the hospital and has had a stroke or a heart attack or fell and broke a hip. Having lost two siblings in the past 3 years, I dread the continuing dissolution of my family. The past two years have been a quiet, reassuring interlude.

Anyway, my conversation with dad somehow went from vague niceties and talk about the weather to reviewing all the threats to humankind facing us in the next 100 years. Dad thinks the years around 2050 will be the watershed when things really begin to go downhill. I was reminded what a pessimist dad is at heart (he always called himself a "realist," however). That is where I got that streak, too, and I wish I didn't absorb it as if by osmosis, but there it is. And like dad, I have contained that nuclear core of despair with a protective shell of pacifism and strained positivity and trying to get people to get along. It's weird. I am very much both my mom and dad distilled into something different than either. But I love them both so much.

On It

Thirty days in the hole
Next contestant!
What the hell do you expect me to do?
There's only so much
Slack I can give you--
I spit on your Siberian Khatru.
So stop sitting on
The fence
Roll out your best response or
Your last defense--
Or get the next 
Contestant.
Please
I've got anger
And an endless supply of
Victims
And a gun
No one's gonna take 
Responsibility
Until it's done--
It's such a perfect, practical
Day.

Chicago Storm

I follow the drift fence
From anon to thence
Hoping the trail is
Not a fader
And I may spy
The back end trailhead

i need a CSA

"Omniscient real estate broker"
Always gets good laughs for Sam Harris
Still 44% think a mushroom cloud
On the TV screen would
Have a silver lining.

dean of boys

Yes, padwan

When she leans over to kiss me

I get the Brillo

I'm left to guess what the hell

Is the dealio

Forego the proclamations

They will just sound banal

I guess you're the alcalde

Of our little Love Canal

it's the return of the screaming carwash girl

A hush will be falling all over the world

tonight.

steamio

I am meat
In muscle shoals
Neither fish nor fowl
Well founded confusion
I'm making bank with Hank the Crank
But I don't really understand
This wank
Though I wanna go
I wanna go, yes I
Wanna go
I wanna go.

taking "creep" to a whole new level

Of DMV lines and second class citizens
Power on like a full MacGruder
Compere collar hair
Shitstorm-predicting media man
Get on that pig and ride.

I'm nice because

For no one else

Finding contentment should have been

So easy for me

Because, because

No one else was like me

black tar and china white

Black tar and china white
Not exactly my childhood Lite Brite
Couldn't punch out the new paper forms
Couldn't conform to 21st century norms
Black tar and china white.

bad bang theory

BAD!
No use for pity it's all so silly
BAD!
Every hit, hits hard
BAD!
Badness floating on love
BAD!
Big explosions in my life I'm reeling and sweating
bad.

buy the lie

The good does not outweigh the bad
We are abuzz with anxiety, facing life
When did life stop caring about life?

failure and loss

Wall hanger
Four banger
Looking for projects
to keep sanity
Florid or sleek
My soul to keep
Striving
For pride
Failure defied
Waiting for success
Bobbing for stress
Trying to sleep
Publicly weep
Failure and loss
Same as the old boss.

wish I were a roofer

I'd have a plan for my day
Hauling gear up ladders
With the lads who labor
Day in day out
Wish I were a roofer
Staring down from up on high
Trying to ignore the voice
Telling me to jump into the sky.

the human life of a chump

Facts don't matter when they don't like you
Anyway tires are squealing even on your
Happiest day
There's just a skeleton of common sense
And a whiff of human pride
Animating the life of a human chump.

birth of a notion

Eclectic fares
Spiral stairs
Tunneling and undermining
Used to be falling
But now I'm climbing.

the confrontational dishrag

As we were curled in our sleeping bags
We dreamed of mountain ranges
At the edge of a salmon stream
A mossy reality limp as a dishrag
Keeps us in our slumber
We wake later in a city flat.

invisible money

It's there somewhere.

democracy

Why don't you just not kill yourself?
Sometimes the strongest thing you can do is
Just survive.
My life as a Monsterquest;
powder residue all over my fingers--
How could you not love yourself?

"Killing myself after my parents die"
Is probably not a good future plan
Setting things up to be a hermit
Will put you in a steel-eyed span
Really,
How could you not love yourself?

the life waste management company

Got to pick up every stitch

Afraid of every all-in and every hitch

No career of creativity and

No getting rich

Oh no

Must be one hell of an itch.

consumer protection

Game on!
for human clinical trials
Tame viruses and technocrats
Twiddling dials.
Game on!
For factories of fiction and for
Dire predictions of
Forfeited planets.

The game plan of
Truth and justice fanatics.

Game over!
For the unseen hand
Game over, man
Game over.